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The purpose of this paper is to employ a reflection on at-home ethnographic (AHE) practice to unpack the backstage messiness of an account to demonstrate how management students can craft fine-grained accounts of their practice and develop further our understanding of management practices in situ.

The paper reflects upon an example of AHE from an 18-month period at a chemical plant. Through exposure and exploration, the paper outlines how this method was used, the emotion involved and the challenges to conduct “good” research.

The paper does not seek to define “best practice”; it highlights the epistemic and ethical practices used in an account to demonstrate how AHE could enhance management literature through a series of practice accounts. More insider accounts would demonstrate understandings that go beyond distant accounts that purport to show managerial work as rational and scientific. In addition, such accounts would inform teaching of the complexities and messiness of managerial practice.

Ethnographic accounts (products) are often neat and tidy rather than messy, irrational and complex. Reflection on ethnographer (person) and ethnographic methodology (process) is limited. However, ethnographic practices are mostly unreported. By reflecting on ethnographic epistemic and ethical practices, the paper demonstrates how a largely untapped area has much to offer both management students and in making a fundamental contribution to understanding and teaching managerial practice.

This study aims to weave together narrative analysis (hereinafter NA) and Actor-Network Theory (hereinafter ANT), in order to address recent calls for performative studies to combine approaches and specifically to use ANT. Particularly, they address how a conflicting narrative is mobilised through a network of internal–external and human–nonhuman actors.

A fragment of data, generated from a longitudinal case study, is explored using NA and ANT in combination.

By engaging with ANT’s rejection of dualisms (i.e. human–nonhuman and micro–macro) and its approach to relationality, the authors inform NA and performative studies. They also add to the limited literature addressing how conflicting antenarratives are mobilised and shape the organisation’s trajectory.

Generalizing from a single case study is problematic, although transferability is possible. Generalisability could be achievable through multiple performative studies.

By demonstrating how counter networks form and antenarrative is constructed to supplant hegemonic narrative, the authors are able to problematise the taken for granted and highlight the possibilities offered by divergent voices.

The performation provides a deeper understanding of organisational performance through our NA-ANT combination, and the authors provide insight into the mobilisation of conflicting narratives in organisation studies.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the ethicality, morality and partiality of at-home ethnography (AHE) through an account of organisational wrongdoing at a chemical plant.

The paper utilises an AHE example from an 18-month period at a chemical plant. Following the account, the paper reflexively explores ethical, moral and partial issues.

A well-crafted and reflexive, insider account of organisational wrongdoing enables the demonstration of the issues of ethics, morals and partiality faced by an ethnographer in the field. Whilst this is not an autoethnographic account, it is able to draw upon some contemporary thinking from autoethnography to inform reflexivity.

The account provides unique insight into an organizational world, the inner workings of a chemical site, which is often inaccessible to others.

IFLA's Universal Availability of Publications programme is concerned with highlighting and solving problems concerned with the widest possible availability of recorded knowledge. Its concern includes the improvement of access to grey literature (material not available through normal bookselling channels) at both national and international levels. At the national level centralization linking bibliographic control and availability is advocated. A centralized approach has already been adopted in the UK where the British Library Lending Division has developed a fairly comprehensive collection of report literature, translations, theses, conference proceedings and back up documents to synopsis journals etc. Through its monthly publication, British Reports Translations and Theses, it is also involved with the bibliographic control of grey literature.

Compares the competencies of managers, working for the same organization, in the UK and Taiwan.

Deploys a comparative analysis of managers using a behavioral event interviewing (BEI) technique.

Concludes that both cultures were highly achievement focused. Notes, however, several marked differences in other behaviors which appear to be cultural in nature. Finds that UK managers demonstrated more interpersonal awareness, and concern for impact, whereas Taiwanese managers were more likely to demonstrate critical information seeking behavior.

Warns that interviews in some instances failed to uncover data, with the consequent implications for the use of generic behavioral event interviews internationally.

Suggests the idea of organizations’ employing generic “international” competency models and behavioral event interview techniques is problematic.

Demonstrates the problems with international competency models through unique access to an organization’s competency model and to managers in two locations.

The aim is to analyse managerial behaviour using narrative analysis to identify stories that are often ignored, silenced or missed by the hegemonic managerialist narrative.

An ethnographic narrative based on an 18 month period of participant observation where the author was a manager in a business unit acquired by another company for $1 billion.

Strategy can be diverted or altered by managers lower down the organization in a counter strategy process. This is consistent with Dalton where managers lower down the organization adapt and change strategy to make it work in practice.

Participant observation and ethnomethodological narrative analysis have the potential to go beyond the hegemonic managerialist literature and identify a much more complex picture. However, such research is always open to criticism as being from the author's “own perspective” and appearing to claim “omnipresence.” Other stories have been given voice but it is never possible to say that all stories have been recovered from the silencing processes of the organization.

A clearer understanding of how management operates counter strategies within an organization in practice. This enables organizations to reconsider how they engage managers beyond the hegemonic narrative.

This paper aims to provide an insight into management behaviour beyond the usual treatment of managers as an amorphous mass as is common in most of the hegemonic managerialist narrative. When managers are told the narratives in this paper they can recount their own similar stories yet these are rarely told.

The purpose of this paper is to compare the competencies of managers in the UK and Taiwan.

A comparative analysis of managers using a behavioural event interviewing (BEI) technique.

Both cultures were highly achievement focussed. However, there were several marked differences in other behaviours which appear to be cultural in nature. UK managers demonstrated more interpersonal awareness, and concern for impact, whereas Taiwanese managers were more likely to demonstrate critical information seeking behaviour.

Interviews in some instances failed to uncover data and this has implications for the use of generic behavioural event interviews internationally.

The research suggests the idea of organisations' employing generic “international” competency models and behavioural event interview techniques is problematic.

The research is able to demonstrate the problems with international competency models through unique access to an organisation's competency model and to managers in two locations.

In retrospect, the process of merging the National Central Library with the National Lending Library for Science and Technology might appear to have moved with clockwork precision and with little dissent. Logic and far‐sighted planning might now seem to have been inexorable.